Wednesday, October 22, 2014

UNDERSTANDING PLACE - KOBANE

One can recall that, after years of modernism
entertaining the idea of architecture as space – e.g. Sigfried Giedion Space,
Time and Architecture, (Harvard University 1941) and Bruno Zevi Architecture as Space,
(Horizon Press, 1957) - that it was Aldo van Eyck in Alison Smithson’s Team
10 Primer, (Cambridge, MIT, 1968) who was one of the first to articulate
the importance of place in architecture: ‘place, not space.’ This started a
broader debate on context, regionalism, that was taken up by others, e.g.
Christian Norberg-Schulz Genius Loci, (Academy Editions, 1980). These
ideas and theories were instrumental in promoting the changes that became
Post-Modernism, popularised by Charles Jencks Post-Modernism, (Rizzoli,
1987), and still things keep changing. Lingering behind all of this thinking
and theorising lies the experience that one knows as place, everyday place. It
is a word that we freely use with little thought. But there is a rich
complexity of senses, feelings and emotions that is an intimate, a subtle part
of living and participating in the infrastructure and shelter required for
social habitation that we so easily overlook when a location, a village, a
town, a place is named. We interpret and categorise the world with our familiar
selective, schematic diagrams.

Kobane. Why Kobane? It is in the news every day
as the fight for supremacy and control continues. Some reports corrected this
spelling to Kobani or Kobanê, but generally the media seemed happy with the
‘error.’ The news was, (7th October 2014), that IS, also referred to
as ISIL and ISIS, was getting closer and had placed its flag on a four-storey
building on the outskirts of the town and on a nearby hill. One Kurdish report
said that this was merely IS playing mind games. But one remained interested in
this town from the glimpses of it in the news. Exactly where was it? What did
it look like? What did it feel like? Reports noted that it was near the Turkish
border in Syria, in the Aleppo district - see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/new-gehry-projects-in-aleppo.html - but that was all. So Google Earth was
opened, and ‘Kobane, Syria’ was typed in.

Ayn al-Arab appeared on the map. Maybe all
spelling problems could be sorted out by referring to this place using its
Arabic name? As the image cleared, the aerial view of the town was revealed.
The line nearby was the border with Turkey. It was indeed a border town. This
was apparently why the IS wanted to take control, seemingly to manage border
crossings into the territory that it held. Who knows what the future holds for
this place that Turkey said would never be held by IS? Many residents had
crossed the border and were watching the shelling of their town with sadness
and a growing frustration.

The Google Earth image of the town presented an
integrated organic clustering of pieces and parts that ebbed out along roads
that crisscrossed through the tiny town squares and stretched out in the
surrounding voids. Small blue boxes appeared over this intriguing aerial view.
These were photographs. Each was opened in order to see more of this place.
Small mud buildings and larger apartment blocks were shown both in detail and
in the broader context of the town, its streets, public spaces and districts.
Surprisingly, the areas beyond the north-eastern limits of the settlement were
bright green. It appeared to be a very beautiful, fertile place, even though
its general colouring appeared dusty, the soft beige of the open landscape.

Very quickly one realised that the report in the
news that referred to Kobane as a location, was talking about much more than an
abstract dot on the map, a strategic military ambition or an insignificant, remote
settlement – a ‘nothing’ in the northern deserts of Syria: an outpost,
elsewhere. This place was home for people. It was real, of some size, (about
160,000 people), seemingly complete with everything to support life and its
expectations. The Google Earth images revealed a diverse snapshot of this place
that offered shelter and sharing as towns do, providing an interface for life
within its civic structure. People lived and loved here; families grew up here;
children played here, were educated here. Folk travelled, worked, relaxed,
worshipped and shopped here as everyone does, but in this unique context, in
their unique manner: home. The details of places in the images suggested more
and more intimacy and prompted an understanding that one has to feel to know; that
one has to consider circumstances in depth with an open mind and empathy.
Appearances do not a place make. People make places, their lives lived and
fulfilled; their hopes revealed; their concerns shared. This complexity is as
much about place as the images. There is a wholeness here that reverberates
like the call to prayer that reaches out and enfolds as it reminds – as
tradition explains, ‘puts back in mind.’

Our cliché guessing that this Arab place might
be a scatty, struggling desert settlement with desperate occupants in
‘backward’ Arab attire is our problem. Like all of our assumptions, we make
schematic overviews that suit our preferences or match those presented to us.
This place is as rich and complex as any great city or tiny village, at its own
scale, with its unique characteristics and relationships to history, geography
and landscape - native place. But for some reason we do not readily recall
this, assuming similarly for other unfamiliar settlements, as we bring all of
our preconceptions to bear, that, say, Tehran is a sprawling, ‘backward’ place
too. One can only be surprised that such ‘foreign’ places will always be more
than this, much more: and, of course, it is; they are. One might be amazed to
know that Tehran, like Dubai, has recently constructed a metro; in Tehran’s
case, linking the city to the airport. The image of the rambling souq drives
imaginations to consider the city otherwise retarded, in another era remote
from ours.The story became the paradigm of Muslim spirituality, outlining the path that all human beings must take, away from their preconceptions, their prejudices, and the limitations of egotism.Karen Armstrong Muhammad Prophet for our time Atlas Books, Harper Press, London, 2006, p.96

Kobane may be perceived as a collection of
shabby buildings by other standards and expectations, but this is architecture
too: it embodies life with its space and form, offering places of various
scales, for various purposes. Pevsner and Ruskin must be declared to be wrong.
Architecture is not ‘special’ building. Architecture is a place loved, lived,
that supports, shelters, and enriches the body and the spirit, no matter how
humble this circumstance might be. It is the fabric of life, existence: its
framework, its scaffold, that forms for functions and functions for forms, with
‘functions’ being a most diverse combination of facts, emotions and feelings,
intertwined into one complex being, being there - thinking, sensing, laughing,
chatting, caring, wondering, loving, involving both people and place in their
most multifarious forms, their dreams.

Kobane, Ayn al-Arab, (or is it Ain al-Arab -
maybe the Arabic is just as confusing?), is such a place, as are all settlements,
whatever their size; wherever there location, each in its own way. This is
PLACE. Alas, it is indeed sad that one has to learn to see a place under such
circumstances as this siege. Imagine the impact of this war on ordinary lives:
simply shattering. Will the call to prayer continue to echo, to reverberate
through place, space, bodies and minds to help decipher the world, with latent
ideas, ideals and a beautiful demarcation of light and time, by worshipping
Allah, ‘the Most Gracious, the Ever Merciful’? Grace, mercy and the wonder of
beauty linger in this place as a yearning; a place much loved by those who know
it as home; sadly ignored by others looking at ‘the big picture’ from ‘outside,’
elsewhere, and see it only as somewhere different, alien.

We spend too much time on the big things in
life, and in architecture too. We indulge ourselves with self-important, lazy trite
truisms. It is the little things that make ‘place’ what it is: a local
habitation and a home.

Kobani: destroyed and riddled with unexploded bombs, but its
residents dare to dream of a new start

Kurdish forces triumphed over Isis in Kobani but the Syrian
town is devastated. Emma Graham-Harrison was one of the first reporters on the
scene

Emma Graham-Harrison

Sunday 1 February
201507.09 AEST

Kobani residents return after Isis retreat: ‘It was beautiful. Now it’s like a destroyed city’

The concrete eagle
in what used to be Freedom Square still surveys Kobani imperiously. But around
it almost nothing stands. Buildings have vanished during months of heavy
shelling, replaced by snarls of steel and rubble, and the yawning craters left
by US air strikes.

One side street is
blocked by the bodies of Isis fighters, rotting where they fell – a pile of
bones marked only by a foul smell. On the muddy track that marks where another
road led, a series of tattered sniper screens veils the destruction of the
schools and homes where sharpshooters had sheltered.

Everywhere there are bullet and shell casings, the twisted
metal of spent mortar rounds and, often, the alarming outline of an unexploded
shell, bulbous nose to the ground and tail fins spiking into the air.

The Kurdish forces’
unexpected victory in this north Syrian town marked a huge strategic and
propaganda loss for Isis, which once seemed unstoppable in their rampage across
the region.

But the mountains of
ruins, the shells and booby traps, the decaying corpses and shattered power and
water systems means that while Kobani has been freed, it is no longer a town in
anything but name. Salvation from Isis came at the price of Kobani itself.

“There are no words
coming back to a destroyed city that was your home,” said Shamsa Shahinzada, an
architect who fled Kobani days before Isis arrived and who was our guide to the
shattered remains– still off-limits to most of its former
inhabitants.

“This was the main
square where people crowded every week to ask for freedom,” she said, eyes
filling with tears as she surveyed what was left of Kobani’s centre. “This was
our friend’s home, we used to stay there. Oh God. Beside there, there was a
school – my high school.”

Over half the city
was destroyed, officials say. Entire blocks are pancake flattened, as if an
earthquake had struck. Even in quieter areas, no building seems to have escaped
unscathed – those still standing are missing windows, doors, whole sections of
walls, scorched black by fire or looted during the fighting.

Some things that
inexplicably survived only highlight the devastation around them: an unsold
tray of snacks sat in one shop window like a perfectly preserved museum exhibit
on a street littered with jagged metal, piles of rubble and the twisted bodies
of cars used for suicide bombs.

Even on the streets
that still look like streets, there is an eerie silence – broken only by the
crackle of distant gunfire, the pop of a nearby shot from training grounds and
the echoing blast of air strikes and attacks by Isis tanks – a constant
reminder that while the militants have been kicked out of the city the
frontline is still just a few kilometres away.

“The battle is not
over yet,” said Anwar Muslim, a former lawyer and head of Kobani’s government
who stayed in the town through the whole campaign and has already brought his
wife and children back to camp amid the devastation. His joy at driving Isis
out of his homeis tempered by concern for the rest of the district; most of it is
still under Isis control.

“As you can hear our villages are still
fighting, and we will only have finished our work after we free all our countryside,”
he told the Observer.

“We, here in Kobani,
are on the frontline, fighting against terrorists on behalf of all the people
of the world … you can see here the cost of asking for freedom.”

The battles and the
devastation inside Kobani mean that tens of thousands of civilians huddled in
freezing refugee camps across the Turkish border, who celebrated victory last
week in the hope of returning, may not be back in Syria for months.

Many no longer have
homes to return to, and the town is far too dangerous and unsanitary to house
them all. “We know people are waiting for us but we can’t bring them back here
because there will be disease – because of the bodies – and because there is no
kind of service,” Anwar Muslim said.

Turkish authorities
are also noting down the names of any Syrians who cross, warning them that they
cannot return. With Isis still just 10km away, and likely smarting at their
defeat, that is a gamble that even those whose houses survived are reluctant to
make.

Certainly Kurdish
officials are not taking their victory for granted, at a time when there is
still a steady flow of casualties into the field hospital from the nearby
frontline.

Soldiers keep a wary
guard on all tall buildings and main junctions, huddled round improvised
braziers for warmth in driving winter rain. Many are caught between elation at
their victory and grief at its cost.

“We are so happy, as
if we were flying through the sky. As if God had created us again,” said
35-year-old Mahir Hamid. “But we can’t celebrate because we had so many
martyrs.”

Isis lost more than
1,000 fighters, but hundreds of Kurds were also killed in the initially
lopsided battle. It pitted hundreds of militants armed with heavy weapons
plundered from Iraqi arsenals against the ageing Kalashnikovs and ancient
Russian machine guns of the Kurds. At one point, officials warned that food
stocks were dwindling dangerously low as well.

The victory was as
epic as it was unexpected – to everyone except perhaps the Kurdish fighters
themselves. Kobani had been all but written off by the outside world last
autumn. The US came to its aid with air strikes in late September but officials
in Washington warned the bombs were not enough to save it, and Turkey’s
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also forecast collapse.

Kurdish vows to hold
on to their base were dismissed as poignantly, but tragically, naive. Isis was
well-armed, and its fighters eager to die in battle. They poured resources and
men into taking the town, and even took hostage John Cantlier there to make a propaganda
video claiming that Isis was just “mopping up” the last Kurdish fighters.

Instead they were
being slowly driven back by outnumbered, outgunned but disciplined forces whom
the city’s leader compared to heroes of ancient Greece in their ingenuity and
bravery.

They even devised a homemade version of an armoured truckto face off against Isis tanks. Steel plates
and half-pipes welded to a flatbed lorry created a safe area, gun turrets and a
battering ram to attack. It looked moreMad Maxthan modern military, and still reversed with
the warning beeps of the original humble lorry, but was part of their slow slog
to victory.

The improvised tank that helped defeat Isis

“We bow down before
these fighters, who were like the legions of ancient Sparta, holding off
terrorism, fighting Daesh against the odds,” said the city president Anwar
Muslim, using another name for Isis.

He has set up a
committee of architects, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other experts to look
at the massive task of clearing and then rebuilding Kobani, which will take
years, perhaps decades. For now, they cannot even get heavy moving equipment
across the Turkish border and fear a simple clearance of the ruins would be too
risky.

“We have unexploded
mortars, rockets, bombs, and maybe some traps for explosion the terrorists left
behind to surprise us, to kill our civilian people or fighters when they clear
up or check the destruction of their houses,” said Idriss Nassan, deputy head
of the government.

“There is no food,
no medicine, no children’s milk. If our people come back now, there will be a
humanitarian crisis on this victory ground.”

Rebuilding will
inevitably be slow because even if the military campaign is entirely
successful, it will stop at Kobani’s borders, so Isis will still surround its
people on three sides.

The Turkish border
is the only route with safe passage, so the government is lobbying for a
humanitarian corridor, and the creation of new refugee camps insideSyria, where they can help with rebuilding.

They are hoping for
help from the allies who sent military aid, and benefited indirectly from the
blow dealt to Isis. The priority is funds for reconstruction, experts in bomb
clearance to help dismantle the ruins, and pressure onTurkeyto open up a humanitarian corridor into
Syria.

The damage is so bad
that some have questioned whether Kobani should be rebuilt on a new site, but
Nassan said that would be emotionally devastating.

“Unfortunately the
city is destroyed, but people have memories here and this is our land. We don’t
want to move everything from here,” he told theObservernear the ruins of an institute where he once
taught English, before Syria’s convulsions propelled him into another life.

“We have to just
clear it, but maybe keep some parts as a museum for foreign people to come here
to see how Kobani resisted the terrorists.”

The city is still
full of evidence of lives dramatically interrupted by the speed of Isis’s
ferocious advance; tiny children’s clothes hanging to dry on a washing line
months after their owners fled to Turkey, shelves stacked with food in areas
where Kurdish discipline stopped looting.

The front wall of a
nearby house was ripped off by an explosion, but a display cabinet in one of
the rooms sat pristine – with television and a wedding photo in pride of place
and untouched stacks of china tea cups and plates, as if the owner had just
popped out. Some civilians are starting to filter back despite the risks. Most
are fed up with terrible conditions across the border.

“I was in Turkey
four months but, for me, it felt like four years. I am taking my family and
coming back,” said Fatima, queueing in the dusk to pass through the Kurdish
border gates with her five children. “If we have to die here that’s OK.”

Their house had
gone, she has been warned, but they were fed up with sleeping on the floor of a
shop in the Turkish border town. “I will find somewhere, even if I have to
sleep in the street I will come back.”

There are perhaps
400 families in the western part of town, estimates Azad, a cook for the
Kurdish YPG – People’s Protection U – fighters. His home survived undamaged
apart from a hole torn in one wall to allow food deliveries without risking
Isis snipers in the street.

He brought his
family back a month ago, including 10-month-old son Fouad. With a well, a
generator and rations distributed by the military, he says they are living
well, even though Kobani is a virtual ghost town without shops, neighbours or
any communal life.

Two ducks, rescued
from an abandoned village, quack happily in their small yard and the soundtrack
of battle no longer bothers even the baby.

“He is used to it
now,” he says. “My wife was frightened at first but now it’s normal for her,
too. We are upset about the destruction but happy we got Isis out. At least we
have that.”

The only person
leaving Kobani permanently was a Turkish member of Isis, returning to his
family in a coffin after dying on the front line.

“We are telling the
world those people came to kill our children, take our women. But if they ask
for their bodies, we will give them,” said Kobani defence minister Ismet Sheikh
Hasan as the coffin was carried through the steel border gate into Turkey.

It passed beside a
crowd of fresh-faced recruits for the Kurdish forces, shuffling with nervous
excitement. They clapped and sang until the door swung open, then raced into
their battered home town with shouts of joy.

They had come from
refugee camps to carry on the fight against Isis, and must have known that many
of them would fall in battle, but just then, elated with victory, no one seemed
to care.

LIVING IN IMPERMANENCE

Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts – serious, sad thoughts – and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space

see: THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE in the sidebar

ON MAKESHIFTS & DISCOMFORTS

Experienced architects will recognize . . . . . a trait of human nature which leads certain clients who are discerning in requiring the nicest efficiency in the arrangements made for them, to rejoice in makeshifts and discomforts of their own devising.

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

. . . no one can relieve (the architect) from the need to rely on his own discretion, for that discretion is linked to a responsibility which belongs to no one but (the architect). It is the exercise of discretion hampered by considerations of cost, of risk, of exact justice, of conflicting interests, of uncertainty as to facts, of misunderstandings and of diverse individualities and dishonest or incapable agents, which is the chief care and preoccupation of architectural practice. To design a building, to draw and specify every part of it, and to direct its construction and see it completed with no other anxieties and dilemmas than belong to the exercise of those duties, is unknown.

About Me

This blog site is a collaborative initiative. For years there has been a discussion with friends and colleagues about the lack of critical debate and general review on matters concerning our environment, its making, maintenance and our understanding of it. Once our newsletters promoted these issues, but events have taken their toll as times and technologies have changed. So it has been decided to grasp the new tools and begin again afresh – doing only more of the same with a renewed vigour.

SPAN

17 August 2012

This blog began as a co-operative concept. While the idea and the stimulus was generated through discussion, the blog has turned out to be an individual enterprise. SPAN stands for ‘Spence and’ in the context of others. As a word, it fitted in nicely with the idea of voussoirs - parts and pieces, complete with keystones, that could ‘span’ the gaps in understanding and communication. The word SPAN also allowed for a shared input into a blog.

Spence Jamieson is an architect and the author of these articles. The blogs show the scope of his interests.

E-MAIL

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voussoirs

THE IDEA

chapters and verses as architectural commentary:

the wedge to isolate, array and shape ideas; the keystone to highlight core, supporting issues.voussoirsis a concept to start an architectural discussion to span the large gap in the debate on things architectural; a bridging of the void in architectural issues by exploring considered bits and pieces. The state of the profession today is highlighted by silence and self. It is introvert and protective. Educational centres remain isolated within their own constructs, being run primarily as businesses. They put very little back into the community. They indulge themselves in their own interests and exclude contrary and different ideas and ideals. They constantly avoid any challenge on concepts or strategies that might change the plotted course. Rarely does comment ever come from this academic world into the public or any arena. Very few publications help direct the public interest. Rarely do newspapers grasp the issues and explore them. One aspect may be given space in the popular press, but architectural debates and concerns are rarely given attention. The professional institutes are doing much the same as the educational institutions. Private practice is doing likewise, offering, if anything, only its own pushy propaganda to the public. Yet there is a discussion and debate in these silences that needs a larger and more open platform. Discussion is alive and well amongst a few in at least one curry house, but the debate needs to be a broadened.voussoirsis the place for this discussion. It is a site for ideas, comment, articles, and critiques on things architectural and associated issues. It is here that matters can be aired and ideas discussed and debated without fear of the neglect and disdain that institutions and private groups and publishers give to open speaking and differing ideas.

There can be no true understanding of any idea if discussion and debate are curtailed in favour of a preferred position.

The images used to illustrate these blogs that have not been taken by the author have been sourced from Google Images and are used under the ‘Fair Use’ rule.

THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE

The early 50's and 60's is a period that is gaining interest in architectural ideas. Perhaps this is why Princeton chose to republish The Tao of Architecture. It is a beautiful little book that discusses the implications of traditional wisdom in architecture. Given the astonishing lack of direction in current architectural theory, the publication is very timely.

Laotzu's idea of formation is heavily concerned with emptiness or non-existence. To him who regards nothing as persistent, what is essentially important in things is the possibility of becoming something, not the opportunity of remaining as something confronting deterioration. Consequently, meaningful incompletion is taken as the most desirable state of tangible being.

p.22

. . . the full meaning of existence is beyond the power of any manifestation. What appears tangible, architectural or natural, is only a means to suggest that which is lacking in appearance and existing in man's intangible understanding and aesthetic feeling.

HOW POETRY COMES TO ME

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light

Gary Snyder

www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/onlinepoems.htm

THE GROWTH OF SIZE

Size does not necessarily count in architectural space. It is the growth of size which is vital.

THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY

I prefer, by far, real islands to imaginary islands, just as I prefer prime documents to novelistic remakes. That's because the real is richer than the imagination. The real demands investigation and is an invitation to sensitive knowledge, whereas the imaginary is more often than not just a collection of stereotypes, a soup of clichés offering an infantile kind of satisfaction. Then, a relationship to the real and its resistance requires changes in thought, in ways of being, in ways of saying, it leads to a transformation of the self. Whereas imagination is nothing but compensation. There's even something horribly autistic about sitting in one spot and spinning out invention by the yard. How much more interesting an open and poetic process involving contemplation, study, movement, meditation and composition.

ULTIMATE THULE

VISION, CIVILIZATION & SPIRIT

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time - - - is he who shall create poems in stone.

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit.

Louis Sullivan

FROM DELPHI

KNOW THYSELF

and next to this:

NOTHING IN EXCESS

AN UNCHANGING PROFESSION

Blenheim Palace . . .Many of the builders went unpaid for years as the disputes dragged on, and most eventually got only a fraction of what they were owed. Building work ceased altogether for four years from 1712 to 1716, and many of the unpaid workers were understandably loath to return when work resumed. Vanburgh himself didn't get paid until 1725 – almost exactly twenty years after work started.

Bill Bryson At Home A Short History of Private Life Black Swan London 2016, p.213

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me~ Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

I must caution my young friends not to expect much novelty in these discourses, for novelty and flights of fancy, however amusing, cannot be very instructive.

Sir John Soane The Royal Academy Lectures edited by David Watkin Cambridge University Press 2000 p.29

CATHEDRALS and SYMBOLISM

Everything is the symbolical representation of an idea. p.28

The same artists, who had to follow a strict rule when treating the history of God, could use all of their imagination when treating the ornamental: whence the blossoming of the grotesque and the original. p.38

In those days religion, drama, and art had the same aim and sought to provoke the same thoughts. They did not pretend to amuse the people; they endeavoured to teach them. p.51

This way of thinking and reasoning takes sometimes a very subtle turn. p.53

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 2

More on how to avoid insult

And if in the endeavour to discharge the duties of my situation, as pointed out by the laws of this Institution, I shall be occasionally compelled to refer to the works of living artists, I beg to assure them that, whatever observation I may consider necessary to make, they will arise out of absolute necessity, and not from any disposition or intention on my part merely to point out what I may think defects in their compositions. For no man can have a higher opinion of the talents and integrity of the architects of the present time than myself, nor be more anxious on all occasions to do justice to their merits and fair pretensions to fame.

Sir John Soane The Royal Academy Lectures edited by David Watkin Cambridge University Press 2000 p.29

ON DEMOLISHING BUILDINGS

Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would only consider the steps, and the weight of the following very simple argument. You allow that it is wrong to waste time, that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste other people’s; for you have some right to your own time, but none to their’s. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living, it must be still more wrong to waste the time of the dead; for the living can redeem their time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of the time of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you; for those works they gave the best of their time, intending them for immortality.

John Ruskin Lectures on Architecture George Routledge & Sons Limited, London p.109

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 1

How to avoid insult

But how much of nature have you in your Greek buildings? I will show you, taking for an example the best you have lately built; and, in doing so, I trust that nothing that I say will be thought to have any personal purpose, and that the architect of the building in question will forgive me; for it is just because it is a good example of the style that I think it more fair to use it for an example. If the building were a bad one of the kind, it would not be a fair instance; and I hope, therefore, that in speaking of the institution on the mound, just in progress, I shall be understood as meaning rather a compliment to its architect than otherwise. It is not his fault that we force him to build in the Greek manner.

LIFE AND THOUGHT

The popular supposition that an industrial revolution, by means of a new technique such as cast-iron, changes architectural style is an inadequate thesis. By changing life and thought it also changes radically the whole function and aesthetic of architecture.Robert Furneaux Jordan, Victorian Architecture, Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1966, p.36.

ON EDUCATION

'. . those who are responsible for giving instruction in the theory of architecture should be practising architects. The warning is necessary because, strange though it may seem, English schools of architecture to-day tend to be run by men who either do not practise at all, or whose practices are for them a very subsidiary spare-time occupation. Often a teaching appointment is a means by which a clever student avoids the humiliation of entering an office as a junior assistant, thus depriving himself of the only opportunity he will ever have of learning something of the practical side of his profession from the bottom upwards. There can be no doubt whatever that the teaching of theory has suffered severely as a result of this habit: and this leads me to the conclusion that no man should be permitted to teach until he is recognized by his Faculty as a Master of Theory and Practice. In other words, he should be not only a practising architect but also, what is unfortunately a much rarer specimen, a good architect.'

ON STAINS

'The mouth kisses, the mouth spits; no one mistakes the saliva of the first for the second. Similarly, there is nothing necessarily impure about dirt. What must be determined are the conditions under which a surface marking is experienced as a stain.'

Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering . The Life of Buildings in Time, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.109

'. . . . . it may lead us to the Grounds of Architecture and by what steps this Humour of Colonnades comes into practice . . . . .'Christopher Wren

ETHICS

Thus Pugin laid the foundation stones of that strange system which dominates the nineteenth-century art criticism and is immortalised in the Seven Lamps of Architecture: the value of a building depends on the moral worth of its creator; and a building has a moral value independent of, and more important than, its esthetic value. We must not consider this emphasis on morality peculiarly Victorian. Whenever esthetic standards are lost, ethical standards rush in to fill the vacuum; for the interest in esthetics dwindles and vanishes, but the interest in ethics is eternal.

Kenneth Clark The Gothic Revival - An Essay in the History of Taste, (1st edition Constable 1928); third edition John Murray 1962, reprinted 1974, p.149.

ALIENATION

Then, as now, alienation was said to have disappeared in a society of abundance, leisure, and consumption.Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre A Critical Introduction, Routledge, New York, 2006, p.45.

EVERYDAY

Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all.

. . . .

What is the goal? It is the transformation of life in its smallest, most everyday detail.

Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, 1947.

FASHIONABLE FORM

They will only remain to later ages as monuments of the patience and pliability with which the people of the 19th century sacrificed their feelings to fashions, and their intellects to forms.

John Ruskin,Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Routledge, London, 1854: p.42

DRAWING WATER

MODERNITY

The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity. News stories and the turbulent affectations of art, fashion, and event veil without ever eradicating the everyday blahs. Images, the cinema and television divert the everyday by at times offering up to its own spectacle, or sometimes the spectacle of the distinctly noneveryday; violence, death, catastrophe, the lives of kings and stars – those who we are led to believe defy everydayness. Modernity and everydayness constitute a deep structure that a critical analysis can work to uncover.

Henri Lefebvre, The Everyday and Everydayness, in Stephen Harris and Deborah Berke, Architecture of the Everyday, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1997, p.37.

NAMING

The simplest act of substitution is to put the name of a maker in the place of his or her work, which amounts to a paraphrase in itself. . . . All paraphrase sets aside the original: To put the name in place of the painting is to remove it from immediate consciousness; to narrate the life of an individual is an act profoundly different from looking into a painting and one that cannot be conducted simultaneously with it. To substitute a temporal narrative, already present in a name, for the physical work of art is to give up those features of the thing that were transient and unrepeatable, bound to a moment that is irrevocably ended; the unique insistence is, for the moment at least, sacrificed on the altar of continuity.

Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p.1.

what is a voussoir?

BEGINNINGS

There is always a beginning before the beginning. (p.63)

No one had ever been able to remember. That’s the problem with beginnings. (p.61)

The story of memory always begins with a room . . . interiors . . . remind us to remember. (p.15)

Edward Hollis, The Memory Palace A Book of Lost Interiors, Portobello Books, London, 2013

ON BRANDING

Branding is now the art of getting people to think what something might be rather than what it necessarily is. It's about the manipulation of the virtual reality in which so many live. The manipulators include anyone with an interest in what we might think of them - not just big companies with products to sell but political parties with votes to win, design gurus with clients to attract - anyone, in other words, acting in some kind of market. They all have an interest in controlling their appearance to make us believe it is the reality.

John Humphrys Beyond Words How Language Reveals The Way We Live Now Hodder and Stoughton. Great Britain 2006, p. 86-87

PRECONCEPTION

Leone Huntsman Sand in Our Souls The Beach in Australian History Melbourne University Press 2001, p.16:

Thus first impressions were filtered through existing preconceptions, starkly revealed in Sir Joseph Banks's description of the people seen from Captain James Cook's Endeavour when it first touched on the Australian continent in 1770:

In the morn we . . . [discerned] 5 people who appeared through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier's account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.

Here Banks refers to William Dampier's unfavourable accounts of the West Australian aboriginal people in published accounts of his landings in 1688 and 1699, and reveals his own awareness of the extent to which perception was influenced by expectation.

JARGON

The world seems to find it necessary to use more and more jargon in general reporting and conversation. It is especially noticed in accounts and discussions on the arts. The ABC TV arts programme presented on 7 January 2017 at 6:15pm had more jargon than usual; indeed, had more unusual expressions than previously encountered, ones that had not been heard before:

"unpicking the tapestry" of one's life;

and

looking at "the fan deck of what you do."

These reminded one of other popular fashionable expressions:

“to unpack an issue,” meaning to analyse it in some detail;

and

“to segue,” meaning to shift to a new topic or activity.

This last term is a favourite of radio announcers. The Italian word is often misspelt as ‘segway’ because of the similar phonetic sounding that is more commonly understood as Segway, the brand of a human transporter.

The parallel is interesting, as the idea of being ‘transported’ is common to both words, but it seems to hold little interest to the radio voices that appear just too cleverly happy with the use of this different, interesting expression.